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Reviving old courses with OCR and TTS | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7097 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 1 of 1 17 August 2024 at 3:40pm | IP Logged |
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Quite a few of the ancient, comprehensive audiolingual-style university courses have been scanned by Internet Archive, and some have shown up in pdf form 'on the interwebz'.
With the tapes, for the most part, lost forever, in many cases, these would have been marginally useful for most learners. But now, now, provided 1) the dialogs and drills are reproduced in the original script & 2) you have access to TTS for the language these courses can be revived. Here's how: 1) Obtain a text version of a dialog or drill (in the language's script; google lens/image can do this very well for many languages if you haven't learnt the script yet). 2) Insert some pauses (use "|" for google translate TTS, or "<break/>" for TTS providers that support SSML*). 3) Recreate the dialog or drill using TTS and obtain an MP3. Step 3 may be tricky. Some TTS providers make this easy, but severely limit the character count per conversion in their free tier service. Google TTS allows a generous 5k characters, but doesn't have great voices for some languages, and makes downloading the output as an MP3 difficult. (However, there are workarounds; I found a Python package, gTTS, which works well.) "That's it!" OK... it's painful. But considering considering the MP3 will get repeated listening, and the alternatives - paying $100s, plus shipping, for cassette tapes recorded when Dean Rusk was US Secretary of State*, trying to learn grammar from a Teach Yourself book, etc - it's totally worth it. *1961-69. FSI Thai, we're looking at you! *Like https://ttsfree.com 1 person has voted this message useful |
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